Visa Partners to Launch New Financial Innovation Platform

Today, a consortium of major companies have launched a new business called  “b.yond”, which is a financial innovation platform that will let banks and consumer-facing businesses rapidly deploy a range of innovative fintech payment services. For digital banks it provides the possibility to showcase to investors or VC funds the potential of their product offering quickly and economically. 

The business has been created to allow businesses to drive customer loyalty, retention and engagement with sticky, digital financial offerings that can be deployed fast. b.yond is betting that users will benefit from the innovation, expertise and scale of the various partners.

Participants in the venture with Visa include Pannovate, Global Pro, Cornercard, Meawallet, Global Processing Services, Modulr, and W2 Global. Each of the companies bring different services to the table for the platform with services such as on-boarding and KYC (Know Your Customer), P2P transfers, card control, Agency Banking, physical or virtual cards, visualisation of statements/spending and alert notification – with Multi-FX, account load, Multi-language, chat support, rewards and cash-back, saving pots, and tokenization. The platform will likely add partners to it enhance the offerings.  

The cofounder of b.yond Neil Harris  said, “b.yond is breaking the mould with its consortium of industry leading companies who are coming together to drive fintech innovation to a new level of simplicity and speed. The project has been all about collaboration-led innovation and with an established list of other leading companies wanting to join the consortium, we expect the initial propositions to grow exponentially as we onboard new organisations and regions.”

Businesses wanting to launch a payments program can use b.yond to access a financial technology platform of high-quality, innovative payment solutions using Visa’s rails, which Visa states can deploy for customers in less than 8 weeks.  

As a platform, b.yond additionally aims to reduce complexities of launching a payment program and having to deal with multiple stakeholders in the payments ecosystem. b.yond also lets businesses deploy specialised vertical add-ons for travel and forex; expense management; ecommerce wallets; gift, loyalty and employee recognition; insurtech; money remittance and membership. Businesses can test and monitor their propositions’ performance.